Muslim religious leaders staged a “pray-in” at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to protest the removal of six Muslim Imams from a U.S. Airways flight for exhibiting suspicious behavior.

According to the Washington Times, “Passengers and flight attendants told law-enforcement officials the imams switched from their assigned seats to a pattern associated with September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attack.” An anonymous U.S. Marshal was quoted as saying, “That would alarm me. They now control all of the entry and exit routes to the plane.” It would scare anyone who lived through the horrific events of 9/11.

The men asked for seatbelt extensions, although none of them were significantly overweight, talked about al Qaida and Osama bin Laden and walked the length of the plane several times after moving from their assigned seats to positions throughout the cabin.

Understandably – the men were escorted off the plane in handcuffs.

Some are calling it a lawsuit set up. Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson is calling it racial profiling and discrimination. Witnesses are just calling it scary.

The Imams were traveling to Phoenix, AZ from Minnesota, where they attended a North American Imam Federation (NAIF) conference. The NAIF has several terrorist and radical Muslim connections, including its founder and chairman Jaafar Idris, “a Sudanese radical on the Saudi payroll who was recently deported for visa fraud and spreading extremism in America” and its co-founder, Salah As-Sawi, “a professor at Al-Azhar in Egypt, a bastion of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood.” NAIF also receives funding from the Islamic Society of North America, named by Judicial Watch as a possible front organization as an al-Qaida front organization.